[seul-sci] Welcome everyone!

["Pete St. Onge" <pete@seul.org>]

For starters, I want to welcome everyone to the SEUL/sci group, the SEUL
task group focusing on the use of Linux and Open Source Software in general
in scientific, engineering and research fields. Science affects everyone,
and I feel that it is important that we remain a group with diverse
science/engineering-related interests and goals. Any and all interested
people are welcome on this list, regardless of education. 

That said, I'd like to invite everyone to introduce themselves to the list,
so that we may get to know each other better and perhaps find common ground
to help each other.

I guess that means that I should start. Well, I'm a limnologist (aquatic
ecologist) by training. My undergrad days were spent in the Environmental
and Resource Sciences program at Trent U (Peterborough, Canada) and my
"nearly completed any day now" Masters project at McGill U (Montreal,
Canada) examines the effect of clear-cut logging and forest fires on
dissolved oxygen depletion in Canadian Shield Lakes. As I finish this
degree, I am starting to plan a Ph.D. project, focusing on aspects of
physical limnology in Canadian Shield lakes.

My first exposure to computers was the venerable VIC20, all those years ago.
I learned BASIC programming on the Commodore 64. Most of my work until the
last couple of years was on the Windows platform, using VB and VBA. However,
as I become more and more involved with programming, I became increasingly
frustrated with the limitations and instability of the Windows 95 boxes in
our lab, and I came to the conclusion that Win9x is not a good choice for a
multi-user lab computer.

My first exposure to Linux was about two years ago, when I first started
getting involved with the SEUL project. I had no idea what the GPL was, let
alone that there was an alternative to Windows. Thanks to Roger (SEUL
project leader), my world changed almost overnight. After all of that
frustration, I found that I could actually do my work on a platform that was
stable, free, and worked well on existing hardware. It was an eyeopening
experience, to say the least. Some time last year, I got into a heated
discussion with a prof at McGill over the use of Linux rather than Windows
for the lab computers. Although I couldn't convince him, I find it quite
ironic that I no longer having the problems that I still hear him talking
about...

My 'programming interests' for the time being, are mainly to port a series
of functions I created for some Windows-based spreadsheets into GNUmeric. As
for other ideas for SEUL/sci, I'll detail these in another email.

Enough rambling. :) I'm looking forward to finding out more about you and
others on this list.

Cheers,

Pete

-- 
Pete St. Onge
pete@seul.org